5 Ways to Use Snapchat to Boost Your Business

With a user base of 26 million people in the US alone and 6 billion video views, which is more than that of Facebook, adding Snapchat to your social media marketing mix is a no-brainer. Snapchat offers interesting ways of strengthening your brand through enhancing brand visibility and provides an avenue to engage with your clientele through innovative marketing campaigns.

Why is Snapchat so Critical

One of the fastest growing social networks, Snapchat processes 400 million snaps a day and has over 100 million active daily users. With 71 percent of its American user base ranging from the ages of 18-34, Snapchat is a critical element in the marketing strategies of many global businesses.

These are the five ways to implement Snapchat for better brand visibility and audience engagement.

Offer Access to Live Events

Snapchat is ideal for live social media marketing as it makes it possible to run campaigns in real time. It can liven up and create a buzz for your marketing activities such as trade shows, product launches, or special events such as the 10,000 customers winning a prize. Big brands such as the NBA have made use of Snapchat to engage with their fans through live streams of the Draft, the Finals, and the All-Star Game. You can use Snapchat to offer a more authentic and unique perspective of your live events, which will enhance audience engagement.

Deliver Private Content

Snapchat can be the perfect platform to debut special content to your audience that might not yet be available on similar digital platforms. The use of Snapchat to surprise audiences or to make them feel special is a marketing strategy that has been employed by fashion brands such as Michael Kors and Rebecca Minkoff. Showcasing their collections on Snapchat before they hit the runway was an incredibly successful strategy. Providing special content such as broadcasting Fashion Week on Snapchat can make your audience feel like they are part of the exclusive event.

Offer Promotions, Perks, or Contests

Everyone, particularly young people that represent the majority of Snapchat users, love promotions and giveaways. By offering discounts or coupon codes, you can get your community of followers coming back for more, listen to your story, and even promote your product by taking snaps of it. One company that effectively executed this strategy is GrubHub. They enhanced follower engagement through a variety of contests, deals, and promotions including Snapchat’s first ever scavenger hunt. By asking users to post daily snaps of either a food doodle or a food selfie to be eligible for a prize, GrubHub drove massive engagement, while creating immense brand visibility and loyalty.

Take People Behind the Curtain

Providing your community with behind the scenes access can significantly help to engage your followers. The only limit to what you can do when it comes to showcasing company culture depends on how innovative and creative you are. You can use it to capture team building events, birthday parties, and even corporate events. One of the most successful companies using this strategy is startup fashion brand Everlane. It has been active in taking clients behind the scenes to show their overall process from when the fashion item is an idea all the way to when it leaves the manufacturing warehouses. This makes clients associate with the process, hence building brand loyalty.

Partner With Influencers

Similar to Instagram and other channels such as Tumblr, having influencers promote your product on Snapchat can increase its reach and enhance visibility. Collaborating with influencers in a given demographic or ones that that understand the Snapchat platform can create spectacular content that gets your brand noticed. Sour Patch Kids was wildly successful when it partnered with Logan Paul, a celebrity with 500,000 Twitter followers. Paul promoted their Real-life Sour Patch campaign to his followers which earned them massive reach and brand awareness.

Final Thoughts

Snapchat’s influence can enhance your brand visibility and client engagement through its innovative real-time marketing features and its vast audience of engaged followers. This is a platform that, if implemented properly, can take your local and global marketing efforts to the next level.

LightHouse Graphics specializes in several areas of online presence such as graphic design, website design, and social media marketing and content creation…just to name a few. If your business needs assistance in any of these areas, give us a call. We’d love to work with you.